Spillin’ The Beans: Ryan Spilborghs weighs in on the complex issues of PEDs

Ryan Spilborghs spent six seasons as an outfielder with the Colorado Rockies, becoming a fan favorite for his walk-up music (“Sweet Escape”), myriad mustaches, car commercials and his big hits (like his walkoff grand slam against the Giants). Spilborghs hit .272 with 42 home runs and .345 on-base percentage in 619 games with the Rockies.

So this my newest blog post. I’m gonna stick my neck out a bit and weigh in on an issue that I think is about to get massive media coverage. Rather than be the guy that chimes in, I want to say my piece before things start potentially hitting the fan.

That being said this newest Biogenesis scandal has brought about many conversations recently, both internally (in my own head) and with my Japanese teammates. Don’t worry this isn’t a “Juiced” bus driving, but rather my personal feelings on PEDs, steroids/HGH, an ethical question, the root of the problem and some personal suggestions how I think the game would have to change to make it a cleaner sport.

Let’s just cut to the chase. The root of the problem is simple: it’s money and the means to make it by everyone involved in the sport. Trying to get money is always going to be a problem. It isn’t a baseball-specific problem; we know that. It simply drives the baseball industry to create the actual monster: The length of the season.

A baseball season is a marathon. It’s an absurd amount of games — 162 games in 184 days! Not to mention spring training, and for many guys (the majority of Latin players) winter-ball, as well as offseason conditioning (which changed drastically from when I first signed in 2002. Can you say ‘high force plyometrics?’). The amount of travel, the number of days you are expected to perform (and your performance leads to your salary), the lack of sleep, the lack of proper nutrition all push players’ bodies to their limits. Often you hear veterans of baseball say, “you can’t play this game on just coffee and water.” And it’s more or less true.

Think about the Tour de France. It’s one of the most scrutinized professional sports because of its competitors’ doping. But it’s also an insane to think an athlete can race, not joy ride, 21 stages through 2,000 miles of France’s undulating terrain in 23 days! How can someone expect those athletes not to search for a little help? You think pasta and Gatorade at the end of the day, and maybe some Clif bars during the race, should keep them going?

Now I am not condoning the use of anything, but merely pointing out that some of the events and sports we’ve created (MLB, NFL, NBA) are pushing athletes too far without giving enough proper rest to allow them to recover. Again why are seasons so long? Money! Because sponsors, cities, owners and networks all make money. The athletes, in turn, reap the benefits financially.

Some of my suggestions for baseball (Tour de France could use some help, too): shorten the season and have more players on rosters. Right now my schedule in Japan would be a very close template (although I have been in Japan since January and won’t return to the states until October and potentially November). Almost every Monday is a day off. The league plays 144 games in roughly 180-plus days. We have periods during the season for makeup dates (rainouts). For example, right now we have five days off from the end of interleague. There is an actually off day, and then practice until we start our league play again. Toward the end of the season there will be a period in September for more makeup dates.

A little perspective from what I’ve been saying: By the time we start on Friday (June 21) our league would have played 62 games (we started two days before MLB). By contrast MLB would have played around 77 games (and that’s with much more difficult travel that has been made better by splitting up the league into separate 15/15. Last year, travel would be slightly more strenuous for teams especially without year round interleague play).

Just looking at the side-by-side comparison, it’s obvious MLB is more strenuous on players than the schedule in Japan, although many of our off days we do practice, we play on harder surfaces with numerous AstroTurf fields, and our travel accommodations aren’t chartered plane flights. But it still is night and day when you look at the number any professional baseball player looks at: off days. It will be 15 more off days than MLB and we aren’t even halfway through the season!

But here’s the rub, a shortened season will never happen. Far too much money is made per game to lose out on 18 games. That goes for both players and owners (a player can turn a season around in 18 games, I saw Tulo do it in 2010, hitting 14 homers in September. Holliday had a crazy run of RBIs in 2006 in about 18 games as well). Just the thought of losing games in July, August and September when the weather is nice and kids are out of school would make any business major squirm.

Since we can mostly agree that a baseball season will always be 162 games long in about 182 days, how can we find rest for players to avoid looking for means for their bodies to feel stronger? Expand the roster is my first change: go from a 25-man roster to a 30-man roster. It would allow for extra pitchers and position players, but it would also increase costs. A lot of cost, five extra players at league minimum ($490,000) is off the bat (pun intended) $2.45 million, not including pension and insurance, as well as pushing five players’ “clocks” towards arbitration. That’s if all players are first-year major leaguers as numbers can change drastically with free agents. The reason why an expanded roster is so important is that it allows managers more options to use players, and it gives guys who need a day off (a “blow”) or nursing an injury some added time without having to place someone on the disabled list. Now a player who is nursing a slight strain can get those needed days without putting the manager at a disadvantage by having a shortened bench (for those who need this spelled out, 25 guys on MLB roster, player is hurt but still available for manager, technically, but reality is manager really has 24 players available).

The other part of expanding the roster is requiring baseball to have a maximum game rule. My suggestion is that no player can start more than 146 games in a season, and cannot play more than 10 consecutive games without a mandatory day off (I don’t count a scheduled off day as end of a session). It doesn’t mean player can’t be used in game he doesn’t start. He can pinch hit, and I would go so far to say that he would not be able to play more than five innings on games he had a mandatory no-start, unless the game goes extra innings. Then, there is no rule.

I’m sure many players who want or like to play everyday will squawk, but it’s like the parent who knows when it’s time for kid to go to bed, or the friend that takes that extra tequila shot out of your hand. There is a bigger picture and in the long run (and morning after), and they’ll be grateful.

Can I be so naive to think that just by expanding rosters and giving players more rest that the use of PEDs and stimulants would stop? Two answers, am I naive (yes, very), and would use stop with current drug policy and more days off? I’d more or less say yes it would stop. I think stimulant use already has somewhat stopped, but would be almost completely gone with fewer games.

PEDs are still a much more complicated situation. Here’s my reasoning on stimulants. “Greenies,” which are amphetamines (already banned), give players a feeling of being in a heightened state — like you’re ready to start a fight. And there’s Aderrall (which players can still use today with a temporary use exemption/TUE, professional doctors clinical suggestion) which gives a player that feeling of being “locked in” and being amped up. In my opinion, it’s already under control with the current joint drug agreement.

In fact, that agreement cut use down significantly (in my opinion) once it was put in place in 2006. But getting caught having taken a “bean” was more a slap on the wrist at first. The current policy carries a much harsher penalty with suspensions that it didn’t previously have. In addition, taking a stimulant is a very slippery slope. I have at some point in my career tried both greenies and Adderall (not at the same time, tried greenies in winterball ’05 and ’06 as well as Adderall those same years). The slope is that although you may be amped and locked in for the game, it doesn’t mean you will play well. In fact I played worse because they made me a bit too crazy. Not to mention taking a stimulant like that before a 7 p.m. game doesn’t make it very easy to sleep that night, which usually resulted in staying up well past midnight. And we all know the saying: “Nothing good ever comes past midnight.”

My point here is that taking a stimulant has lost much of its appeal already. Taking stimulants was a result of being exhausted from travel (believe me, AAA travel last year was atrocious, and still is, but the risk/reward of taking a stimulant has no benefit with the joint drug agreement). Expanding a roster and ensuring guys have more days off pretty much wipes out any illegal stimulant from being a necessity. And guys have found that Red Bull and FRS, or other energy drinks and legal powders have good effects without driving you to stay up all night.

Now before I really try to dig into the meat of the whole scandal of using PEDs (Biogenesis), there are far more complex issues involved here. We are dealing with 1) Trying to gain a competitive edge (or maintain one) for competitive purposes. 2) Trying to gain a competitive edge for financial purposes (wealth for individual and family members, with a lot of people attached to a player’s personal tree, including agents with family members) and the ethical dilemma it poses in trying to pursue whatever being a successful athlete is defined as. It’s not a simple debate of cheating is “plain and simply wrong” (it is), because every player comes from different ethnical, economical, social and religious background. It isn’t black and white.

For example my Latin teammates I’ve played with over the years — including some who have have been suspended already — have always told me that doing whatever you had to do to make it to the states, to make it to the majors, to have a long career is partially embedded in the baseball culture of their home countries. Many are victims already of people who had “their interest” in them by doctoring birth certificates and other means to help player make as much money as they could. Getting “off the island” to play baseball is a big deal to these guys, and players that couldn’t make it often carry a stigma. Plus, many of my Latin friends already feel like they have to come to the “States” and take someone’s job, that there is a “me against the world” mentality by being the foreigner on a domestic team, and now that I am that foreigner taking a job from a local, I understand this sentiment. Does it make it right? Absolutely not. But there is already such a fear that someone else is doing it or will do it and take their spot that they have the natural response becomes, “it is what it is.”

I’m not gonna say it’s human nature to cheat, but it certainly is our nature to push the envelope as far as we can as to give ourselves any advantage in our life. If there is a corner to cut, a chance to speed, or a deck to load, the majority of people take those advantages. That being said, assuming many people will look for some sort of advantage, now, attach a life changing financial reward for taking that advantage. Imagine someone offering to give you the winning numbers to next month’s Powerball for a fee, plus the chance it could bring some sort of scandal. I’m saying most people take this deal. In fact in baseball it’s already happened. Think back to the steroid days and how much money many players benefited from taking PEDs — many with the same fears that “if I don’t do it someone else will” mentality. They may have lived through scandal for a very painful period of their lives, but they still have their money. There are many players now in the big leagues that have already been caught and served punishment for their use of PEDs, but are still playing in the big leagues and still found ways to obtain another lottery ticket.

My personal struggle is that I never took any PEDs, that I’m now hanging onto my career at 33 years old in a foreign country and wonder, “What if I had, what would be different?”

I had several factors for not wanting to take any PED’S to begin with:

1. I’m terrified of needles, (ask anyone who has ever taken my blood or my wife, she will run me over with the best of them).
2. I have always believed I was a better player than everyone else, and I like to work.
3. I had never suffered any major injury (Never a sense of despair of career coming short due to injury).
4. I always assumed I would make enough money to be happy, never a goal to be rich, simply a byproduct (still absolutely true even with a family).
5. I always wanted at the end of the day to be able to look myself and my family in the eye and say, “I did it right”.

Those were the factors stopping me, but those factors haven’t stopped other guys, and when I say “that I wonder what if,” I say it because in my MLB career, I had a “comp” (in the MLB arbitration process players are compared against each other in similar age, position, and stats to help determine salary, so a comp is your comparable) that has gone to have a very productive and financially rewarding career. I know I may not have been as good as this player from the beginning, but regardless, some of his decisions have helped to make him a better player, and you can’t argue that taking PEDs doesn’t help a player when there is no way to figure out if he didn’t take it if his career would be the same, and or vice versa. Maybe if I took something it would have made me a better player, maybe I would have gotten more contracts, and maybe I’d be still playing in the big leagues right now. Or maybe I’m embarrassing my family and my name having myself involved in a scandal.

Luckily I don’t know that answer, and I never want to find out. I choose my path and will take it to the bitter end, but I always ask this question to my friends within baseball, “at what cost are you willing to make you and your family rich?”

I have been a part of the MLB union ever since I was first signed in 2002. I was a player representative for the last couple years I was in the major leagues, and know for a fact that players and the union want a clean game. Making the game clean is the top priority. Having an even playing field puts all guys at ease. Major League Baseball players have pushed internally to help make the current drug program the toughest and strictest in all of professional sports. It was the player representatives and the view of the players union to include HGH testing to make sure the league was held to the highest level of integrity the league has seen thus far.

There wouldn’t be the fear of “what if” or “someone else is gonna do it and take my job.” It allows guys to feel confident that working their butts off and making all the right investments in themselves (sleep, nutrition, conditioning) can make them a successful major leaguer. During the recent CBA process (took years) I can’t tell you how many conversations we’ve had with guys talking about cleaning up the game, making it the best product it can be, about how proud we should be in making strides to ensure the game we leave for the next generation of MLB players will be cleaner and more competitive. It’s why I’m guessing (I’m not within the walls anymore) the newest scandal has got to be a blow in the gut. It was to me. It’s frustrating knowing that under my watch the game was still tarnished. So what’s the next step?

Suspensions, taking of trophies, exclusions of all star games and World Series are all deterrents, but it’s not the end all. Penalizing a contract, destroying a wallet is the end game. If a player is making $5 million during a season as part of a three-year contract, and gets suspended 50 games, he’s still making more than $3 million plus whatever he’s going to make the next couple years. The reward is still too great. Take it a step farther: a player has a great season, gets caught using, receives a 50-game suspension but is a free agent. He still makes a fortune because his numbers are based off a PED season. Penalizing a contract after being caught using a PED; having season numbers not erased from record books, but from being allowed as part of the arbitration process; not taking away service time from the process, but figuring out a way to handicap a season tainted by a proven PED positive. The major problem with this is that the arbitration process is so important not only to each individual, but to the league as a whole. Players use each other’s arbitration process as a benchmark for their earnings. So there isn’t really a viable solution without under minding the entire process. Regardless, if there were consequences to testing positive during a season and having financial windfall the next season the risk would be too great that there would be no benefit to even trying. It would also prevent any outside influence that might even have a secret formula from even being considered an option.

As I have said from the very beginning, this whole scandal is based on trying to obtain money. When the risk so far outweighs the reward, it’s no longer a serious issue, even if the punishment doesn’t quite fit the crime. The obvious issues that arise are guys who have a false positive, or any other chain of command, or contaminated sample arguments, because it becomes extremely important to get it right. A mistake could devastate players’ financial security.

Another side of this whole argument is what Ryan Madson of the Angels (been spinning his wheels during his rehabilitation of his throwing arm) has suggested in having doctor administered/league approved use of HGH/ or steroid to help a player recover from injury. A close friend of mine, a doctor and trainer of Olympic athletes, suggested one time that the Olympics should administer their own steroid program to ensure the health of their athletes — that it would level the playing field. So rather than try to eliminate the use of PEDs, steroids would be an MLB administered program (Madson did not suggest this, but I am simply playing devil’s advocate) that gives players safe and healthy doses that would help prevent injuries, and probably prolong many careers and lives. Wouldn’t you think teams would want to make sure their players stayed healthy and playing at their best levels, especially if players were under long term contracts? Would you consider that a good product if you knew that players in all professional sports were all given low doses of steroids or whatever medically and league approved alternative to keep everyone in health and competing on similar physical levels? Especially if seasons stay as long as they are and rosters don’t expand? Personally I say no, but I also make a long “ahhhhhh” as if I’m thinking about actually saying yes right before, but I do think we should look into some of the possibilities for helping athletes recover from injury.

So that’s my take. I know baseball will do all it can to clean up the game. I’m still really proud to play the sport, and know that it’s being left better for the next group. I guess I know there is no simple fix. But I’m also acknowledging that the scandal isn’t a simple black and white problem. The more I talk to teammates and friends the more varied responses and suggestions get. I think even if the game was played for peanuts, there is going to be something to try to push through the long and grueling season, unless you get some rest.

Terrific stuff, Spilly. This discussion is almost always presented in stark black and white terms, and this gives us all something to think about. Thanks.

KC_ n_CO

Just stumbled upon your blog, Wow! Awesome insight. Wishing you the best in Japan. Kellie

Brian

right on Ryan…I also think there should be some kind of player salary cap that even players like Hamilton and Pujols for example can only make $15 million a season no matter if they win Triple Crowns or MVPs…that would be a start since players would know that after you get to making that, you can not go any higher

johnmiltonrocks

Spilly, Thanks for that-interesting and well thought out.

ARJesse

I agree with penalizing the salary of players caught using, if there’s no money to be gained then that takes away a big part of the reason to use. But I think teams should also be held accountable.

My reasons are: 1.) the received the services of this player. 2.) they should be policing within (and I’m not entirely certain aren’t in the know most the time). 3.) For the Player’s union, I think it’ll keep teams from trying to use suspensions for their budget concerns (i.e. Yankees and A-Rod).

I would suggest the loss of a first round pick.

I mean if you can lose a draft pick for signing a free agent who received a qualifying offer, why shouldn’t a team be penalized for having the assistance of a PED user? Losing Melky didn’t hurt the Giants. He may not have been the reason they won games, but he contributed to those he played in, giving them an edge.

Jeff Stuart

This is my first time reading your blog. The insights you provide were well thought out, and you have obviously been thinking about these for quite some time.

The entire money issue creates problems in all sports. Playing hurt versus playing injured. Team doctors pushing a player back too quickly. Fans upset as their star player is in a slump, and “he makes $15M per year”. I live just outside Toronto, and enjoy most sports. The interesting part is that I enjoy the Canadian Football League more than the NFL. The reason? Less money. Average salaries are in the range of $80K per year. Players play for a living, and for the joy of winning. They often have a “winter job” which will enable them to transition once retired. The same applies to the WNBA, where salaries are low, and players either play elsewhere during the offseason, or have a job.

It is a harsh statement but money corrupts. It makes people make choices they may otherwise not have made. We lose the innocence of youth, and simply see sports as a way out of a situation. Poverty creates the illusion that having money is the sole objective. It is not. I recently met a successful businessman who pointed out how “expensive” children are. Wow! My daughters come with a price tag – priceless.

Keep up the outstanding writing.

James

Always knew the guy was special in personality but… he has a future as a writer too. Like his conversational style… comes across as unique and fun to read.

Could easily see him doing SI stuff on baseball… or working for MLB or being the front guy for the Rockies. His blogs have been very honest… practical, funny, interesting… very human and very Spilly.

Thanks buddy…

Michael

Wow, great read. Missing you here in Denver, buddy. Never really given much thought to expanding rosters and having mandatory off days

jimt

Well written and obviously well thought out.

Mitch

Great read Spilly! One question, do you think that if other guys weren’t taking enhancements it might have extended your own stay in the league, since your own stats wouldn’t have been compared to inflated figures?

steve

Did he discuss how obvious it was that Helton was on? You think the announcer just made it up? lol

Tim A

I think medically they should be able to administer both, from a league approved doctor. I think low amounts too healthy players tarnishes career records, but small amounts in brief stints too recover from injury should’t effect overall performance much, other then allowing players too be healthy more. I think the two major things in baseball right now that need the most work, are injury prevention/treatment, and more involved minor league nutrition, and conditioning. It makes no sense to invest the bonuses that teams do, then spend so little on making sure that A ball players eat right, and condition properly. I think the biggest moneyball strategy in baseball right now, would be investing far heavier in player development, and providing proper nutritional support, and physical/phycological training at the lower levels. “I’m not an athlete lady, I’m a baseball player,” just wont cut it any more.

Jed Perkins

Very thoughtful piece. Thank you for sharing, and best of luck to you going forward. You are a class act!

Patrick, a third-generation Colorado native, is back for his second stint covering the Rockies. He first covered the team from 2005-2009, helping chronicle “Rocktober” in 2007 and also following the team’s playoff run in 2009.

Nick Groke has worked at The Denver Post since 1997, as a sports reporter, city reporter, entertainment writer and digital editor and producer, among other newsroom posts. He also writes regularly about boxing, soccer, MMA and NASCAR.